YouArchive.It Blog

Apple has just released the firmware 3.0 for the iPhone, and we have been flooded by emails of users asking if iTextUploader can be used with it…

In short, YES.
We have been testing iTextUploader with 3.0 since beta 5, and everything seemed to be working for us.

So, as soon as the iPhone Dev Team releases the official 3.0 jailbreak (which is expected in a few hours), you can safely upgrade your iPhone and use iTextUploader with it!

But that’s not all… Firmware 3.0 included (finally) native MMS support for the iPhone 3G. MMSs can contain photos, sounds, videos and much more, so we will release an update for both iTextUploader and YouArchive.It to fully support them. We are working on it, and we hope we can release it the next month.
Surprisingly, though, iTextUploader 2.5 is already capable of uploading MMS messages if they contain just text!

Oh… I forgot to say just one thing… Expect some big news in the next months!

We are proud to present iTextUploader 2.5 for iPhone!

This upcoming release will finally include a feature requested by many users: Automatic Upload! This means you won’t need to manually open iTextUploader and upload messages anymore: your iPhone will do that by itself, while it is in your pocket!
Automatic Upload is very flexible: you can decide how often to upload texts: every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours and so on. Also, to maximize performances, you can choose to disable Automatic Upload while you are not connected to a WiFi network.

Unlike many other iPhone applications running in background that consumes battery power much more than normal, iTextUploader’s Automatic Upload is highly optimized for maximum battery life.
The application is only launched when it has to upload messages and, thanks to Smart Upload (the key feature of iTextUploader 2.0), it uses the network as little as possible. We believe we did a good job: while we were testing Automatic Upload in the past weeks, we did not notice a considerable impact on battery life.

For technical reasons, though, Automatic Upload will be available only for VIP users. Those are all users who donated to our project 5€ or more.
We are sorry we had to do this, but we had no choices. If we let everyone use Automatic Upload, our systems would soon become overloaded, making the site unusable for everyone.

VIP users will have all the advantages of current donors, plus the ability to use Automatic Upload. To sum up, here’s a list of privileges reserved to VIP users:

1. VIP users can store unlimited messages
2. VIP users can use Automatic Upload
3. VIP users don’t see any advertisement in iTextUploader

To become a VIP user, you need to make a donation of just 5€ (or more).
For your convenience, we have also prepared an automated system to process donations. This means that, unlike in past, donations will be received almost instantly, and the upgrade of users account to VIP will require just a few seconds, after you complete the checkout using PayPal.

Users who had already donated will become automatically VIP.

We are currently completing a last couple of things, and iTextUplaoder 2.5 will be released in a few days (before the end of the week).

iTextUploader 2.2 has just been released in both Cydia and Installer!
This is the real, working iTextUploader 2!

iTextUploader 2.0 was an unlucky release: despite the long, public beta testing phase, it contained an error that made the application crash for some users.
That error is now fixed, and iTextUploader 2.2 is working correctly.

To see what’s new in iTextUploader 2.x, please read the original announcement.

iTextUploader 2.2 contains also a new application icon: we hope this one looks better in your Springboard. Do you like it?

As someone has probably noticed, a new release of iTextUploader has just appeared in Cydia…
But it’s not a new one!

iTextUploader 2.0.1 is JUST version 1.1.0

iTextUploader version 2.0, released a few days ago, contained a bug that made the application crash on some iPhones.
We have been struggling with this for 2 days, and we haven’t found the cause of the issue yet; so, we decided it was better to put the old, working version up.
But, to make sure the old release is up and visible, we had to change the version to something higher than 2.0.

If iTextUploader 2.0 was working correctly for you, you don’t need to update to 2.0.1!

We apologize again for the inconvenience. We are continousy working on the issue, and a patched release of iTextUploader 2.0 will arrive as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience.

Finally, after a long development, iTextUploader 2.0 has been released!
You will find it in both Cydia and Installer in a few hours.

Smart Upload

The biggest change in iTextUploader 2 is the new Smart Upload.
We have completely rewritten the most important part of iTextUploader – that is, the code that manages the upload of new messages, making it much, much better!

The key points of Smart Upload are:

1. Dramatically reduced size of uploaded data.
   We have just one word to describe the results we got in this task: awesome.
   iTextUploader 2 uploads much less data, saving time and, most important, bandwidth. This is especially useful when uploading over cellular network (EDGE or 3G), that are not so fast. Also, not every user has an unlimited data plan, so Smart Upload helps saving money too!
2. Automatically import contact names.
   You won’t need to type the name for every phone number in the WebApp! Thanks to Smart Upload, this is done automatically: contact names are read from your phone Address Book.
3. No more Locale Settings.
   Thanks to the changes introduced, if you plan to use only iTextUploader with YouArchive.It, you won’t need anymore to set a Locale. This means that every Country is now supported, without our involvement.
4. Upload progress bar.
   You might consider this just an eye-candy, but we think it’s much more: you will now be informed about the progress of the upload process, so you can track its speed and get an approximate idea of the time it requires.

Almost all these ideas came from feedback we got from our users.

In addition to Smart Upload, we have fixed some minor bugs.

Faster… How much?

We said the improvements in reducing uploaded data volume (and thus making upload faster) were simply awesome.
But, how much faster is Smart Upload?

To test it, we started with a database containing about 10 000 messages and uploaded it for the first time.

WITHOUT Smart Upload, size of uploaded data is 4712 KB (abut 4,5 MB!). It takes about 10 minutes over EDGE!
WITH Smart Upload, size of uploaded data is just 156 KB! Using EDGE, it takes just 20 seconds to upload!

With Smart Upload, importing new messages is 97% faster!

In real usage, then, it’s even faster!
In fact, while iTextUploader 1.x used to upload all your messages every time (even if there was just 1 new!), iTextUploader 2 sends only last ones! So, if you have thousands of messages in your database, importing new ones can be much, much faster!

How could we achieve this? It has been possible thanks to the use of Gzip compression on data represented in JSON format.

Where to find iTextUploader 2?

iTextUploader 2 will be available in both Installer and Cydia in the next few hours.
Of course, it is completely free!

Just one more thing…

Our service is completely free, and we could not survive if it wasn’t for the support we always get from donors.
We can’t stop thanking them, every time. To show our gratitude, we have been removing every limit for them (allowing them to store unlimited messages).
But we knew we could do more.
Starting from today, in addition to the previous privileges, every user that donated 5€ or more won’t see advertisements in iTextUploader anymore!

After less than a couple of weeks, we are now ready to release the second beta for iTextUploader 2!

You can already find it at this page.
Users who installed beta 1 are required to update soon: the first beta will be disabled by our server in a few days.

Beta 2 finally completes the feature set of iTextUploader 2, adding the Import contact names function.
With Smart Upload, added in beta 1, we were already extracting names from the address book when importing new contacts. However, before this update no one could automatically add names to already uploaded contacts.

As for beta 1, using this version is recommended only to expert users.
Also, please report every error or strange behaviour you might find.

The development of iTextUploader 2 will continue with a third beta, which will hopefully be the last before the final, public release.

Update – February 15th, 2009

A bug in beta 2 has been found in the “Import contact names” component, that prevented it to work in some occasions.
We have just released beta 3, a small update fixing this issue.

Beta 3 solves also a login issue with passwords containing the “+” symbol (this bug is present in the stable 1.x branch too).

Finally, after a long development, we have just released the first beta of iTextUploader 2!

First of all, let me say that this version will never appear in Cydia: since it’s not stable, we don’t want everyone to use it!
To download it, please go to this page and follow the instructions there.
We recommend it only to expert users.
Also, if you try it, please report every error or strange behaviour you might find.

iTextUploader 2 brings a completely rewritten import system, called Smart Upload.
Key features of Smart Upload are:

• Automatically add contact names to phone numbers!
  This has been requested by many, and it’s now finally complete. You won’t need to write manually the name of every contact anymore!
• Much faster upload!
  Thanks to the new code, we won’t upload anymore unnecessary data. This will  save lot time, bandwidth and, for users without a data plan, even money!
  
  For example, in the last test we imported 16 messages from a phone containing 4500 messages. Without Smart Upload the amount of uploaded data was around 685KB; with Smart Upload only 11KB! This is just 1.6%!

This is the first beta so it might include many bugs. Also, a couple of features are still missing.
If everything goes in the right way, the final version might come in a few of weeks.

We have just completed a new update for the WebApp!
At the same time, we have moved the site (again) to a new server, which should keep our data in a safer way.

Most of the work for this release has been done “under the hood”: we had to prepare the site for the new iTextUploader 2!
For this purpose, we had completely rewritten the Address Book backend.

In response to your feedback, then, some other changes have been made:

• When exporting messages, it is now possible to select all messages in your archive with one click.
• Full support for emoji (use this with firmware 2.2)
  
• When exporting in CSV format, another column is added, containing a “human readable” date

iTextUploader 2 beta is being packed right now and will be released very soon (probably in a couple of days).

The YouArchive.It staff wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year for you and all persons who you love!

Almost a year passed since we opened the site for everyone, and now we are very happy about the success we get every day!
We know that we could achieve these things only thanks to you and your precious support. So, we would like to thank every single user for giving us the pleasure of appreciating our little creation.

We are going to take a few days’ break, to rest ourselves a little. We will return soon, with hundreds of ideas for the next year!

Many times, in the last news, we told that we were working on some big changes…

Today it’s time to announce the first new thing!
Maybe this is not the most important, but it’s surely the most requested by users.

I’m talking about iTextUploader.
We are working on version 2.0, which is going to add a new feature called Smart Upload:

• Faster upload. Currently, iTextUploader uploads to our server all your messages. If your database is very big, though, this can require a long time (espcially over EDGE), and can use lot of traffic.
  With Smart Upload, instead, only new messages are imported (which means messages newer than the last upload time)! Also, we finally put an progress indicator, telling you the percent of uploaded data.
• Automatically import contact names. This has been requested since long. You won’t need anymore to manually assign names to phone numbers in the WebApp! With this feature, we would also like to completely remove the Locale settings from the application.

We will probably release a beta version, available just in this site, before releasing it publicly in Cydia/Installer.

Currently, the first part of Smart Upload (the faster upload) is completed and already present in SVN. But don’t try it: the server does not support the new upload method yet .

The second part, instead, is still under development. This proved to be very complicated.
The problem is that phone numbers can be stored inside the address book in many ways. For example, consider this phone number: +39 340 1234567: this is a typical Italian mobile number. But, as you know, the international prefix (+39) is not necessary, so almost everyone stores numbers without it in the address book. We needed a way to check if two numbers are equal, but without reinventing the weel!
We knew the iPhone already included this function, but it does not stay in public (and documented) frameworks.
In fact, we had to use a private framework called AppSupport, which is completely undocumented (there are only a few snippets of code scattered around forums by hackers). It took many days to figure out how it worked, and finally, with a lot of luck, we were able to write a key portion of code a few days ago. We are now implementing it inside the application.
Please note that this doesn’t mean iTextUploader 2.0 will be less safe than the previous version! Almost every application present in Cydia at the moment is using private frameworks, so I’d say it’s “normal”.

Speaking about a release date, we are a bit late. We are very busy in the so-called “real life”: you know, every year, as Christmas approaches, everyone has more and more commitments every day
I don’t think we will release the beta before Christmas, as we said before. But we’ll do our bests to complete it before the end of the year.